Allan McKay Live Action Series Video 2 of 7 – FX Choreography

I had a MASSIVE response to part 1 – bare with me as I’m still replying to emails and messages but all of the positive feedback is so great, because it shows me how excited YOU ARE to take this training seriously and seek higher quality training, but also higher quality output from yourself.

The biggest change I had in my career was really taking ownership of my shots. Not focusing on “that will do” attitude, but instead taking ownership and making the quality of our shots the best they can be, knowing that once they’re approved, you’re going to be seeing this movie again and again knowing that you’ll never be able to change or adjust those little things you wish you had just put in the bit of extra time to pull off.

I think this is important – to put in the extra time to make your shots the absolute highest quality, that you can be proud of – even if you had to have a few sleepless nights to get it done, knowing that it holds up a year or two or a decade later..

I think a lot of us get into the habit of diving into our shots and then only later starting to think about how they should actually look.

There’s so many bad habits we all have, and it’s time to start crushing them! That is why we put in the time last lesson to build our system right the first time, and it’s only now that we have a fast and intuitive workflow, that we start to choreograph our FX and set up the timing, the motion and the feel of the shot.

Because we’re able to now get changes out fast and work in phases so we have wasted absolutely no time and hit the ground running with our FX.

We’re buying back our time by doing this up front, so that we have more time later to really make our shots amazing and add all those extra effects and polish our animation in places where typically before we would just run out of time and energy and not be able to do the things that we will notice forever after.

So it’s time for us to take ownership of our shot, get comfortable and lets go through this training and really try to hit the timing right, get the weight and the feel of everything right the first time – make this have that impact that we need and make it feel as real as possible.

Let’s do it.

-Allan

PS. A lot of you have asked about the 500 hour Live Action Series we’re launching soon – I’ll send more info in the next email if you want to read up a bit more about all of the subjects we’re covering and visual effects sequences we’re going to be doing. The third video is also really cool – I’ll try to send this out sometime Friday 🙂